
Let us honor Mother's Day with some overly tailor-made news: an upcoming remake of
Mother's Day, Charles Kaufman's second directorial effort for his brother Lloyd's Troma Studios.
It'd be easy to lump
Mother's Day in with the raft of early 1980s holiday-named slashers following the success of
Friday the 13th – but
Mother's Day has an alibi: it was being filmed in late 1979 at the same time as Friday the 13th, on the opposite side of the same lake (a store location in
Mother's Day even shows up in
Friday the 13th Part 2), and released just a few months later than
F13's theatrical date. Its campy quality does makes it feel like a few of the 80s slashers, but it's heavier on...certain unpleasant content than slashers tend to be, and ultimately plays more like a very light
I Spit On Your Grave than a woods-based stalker flick, fitting less into the slice-n-dice genre than the backwoods-horror tradition. It's got a small following but not one of my favorites.
The new version is expected for Mother's Day of next year. Director is Darren Lynn Bousman of
Saws
II-
IV and
Repo! The Genetic Opera.
Co-producer Richard Saperstein tells the
Hollywood Reporter that the flick "will be post-'
Strangers' in that it has very realistic qualities but has a high-concept overlay, this punishing maternal figure." Expect a mess.
Labels: darren lynn bousman, friday the 13th, mother's day